Notwithstanding the significant advances made in the past decades, electronic document technology continues to suffer from a number of disadvantages preventing users from fully realizing the benefits that may flow from advances in computing and related technology.
Hypertext Markup Language or Cascade Style Sheet (HTML/CSS) provides facilities assembling content such as image files and video files from anywhere on the World Wide Web into a Web page or frame. Display of Web pages and frames is typically managed by Web browsers that incorporate the layout rules associated with HTML/CSS.
Much of the dynamic content on the Web is assembled into templates using server page technologies. Server page technologies may permit the assembly of content fragments from varied sources.
Various Web sites cycle visibility in a designated position among sets of content items, or shift visibility in a designated position across constituents of a single content item, using facilities provided by HTML/CSS and by scripting languages such as Javascript.
The very limited download bandwidth and screen real estate associated with mobile devices has motivated the creation of the WAP (Wireless Access Protocol) network. Because building a WAP site is labor intensive, the WAP network remains extremely small, in comparison to the World Wide Web, and has correspondingly less to offer users. For purposes of search, the World Wide Web is a vastly more powerful resource than the WAP network.
Limited download bandwidth and limited screen real estate has also motivated the creation of browsers that reformat HTML files for presentation on mobile devices. These mobile browsers reformat content so that horizontal scrolling is reduced. They may introduce page breaks into tall pages. They may remove or replace references to large files. They may replace fonts. They may offer distinctive user interfaces. Similar functionality is also offered by server transcoders that intercept user requests for HTML files. Such a server transcoder may be applied to reformat Web pages that satisfy search criteria. Current mobile browsers and server transcoders offer at most very rudimentary content extraction facilities, based on limited ranges of simple criteria.
Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds are Web page constituents that typically each occupy only a small proportion of a total Web page area. RSS feeds include time-varying links to other Web sites, with brief descriptions of the content items associated with the links. Software tools (“scrapers”) may be used to automatically generate RSS feeds from Web pages. Scrapers identify link constituents on these Web pages.
Standards and proposed standards related to XML (Extended Markup Language), such as XPath, XQuery, XPointer, and XLink, provide more powerful facilities for accessing content than were available in the earlier days of the Web. However, content sources may differ drastically with respect to how they represent content, even when the content sources use the same dialect of the same language, and even when the content sources have very similar content. Effective use of XPath, XQuery, and similar technologies requires detailed knowledge of how content is represented in particular sources. With these technologies, an impractically large body of intricate code may be needed if content is to be drawn from a large number of potential sources.
Certain Web sites aggregate content from other Web sites. For example, a news aggregation Web site includes time-varying headlines from various Web news sites. These headlines double as links to the associated stories on the source sites. The dynamic content available on these Web sites is limited to a fixed repertory, from which users select the items they wish to view.
Certain Web sites allow users to personalize the assembly and display of information within tightly constrained limits. For example, a user may be able to choose which RSS feeds he/she wishes to include on his/her personalized page. The user may also be able to specify the assignment of the RSS feeds to display columns, the arrangements of the columns themselves, graphic treatments such as fonts and colors, and other minor display variations.
Whether taken individually or together, these technologies do not fully support flexible assembly, extraction and/or deployment of content from electronic documents, where the content items themselves, as opposed to links to the content items, appear on users' displays, where the content items need not correspond directly to any existing links, where the content items need not correspond to pages or frames, and where the content items may be drawn from any source whatever, including the public Web in its entirety. Whether taken individually or together, these technologies do not fully support aggregations of flexibly extracted content. Whether taken individually or together, these technologies do not fully support organizations of content for display that permit large amounts of varied content to be conveniently viewed, while the use of screen real estate is substantially minimized, while the use of download bandwidth is substantially minimized, and while the use of screen panning mechanisms such as scrollbars is substantially minimized. Such flexible assembly, extraction and organizations of content for display are especially needed for mobile devices. Whether taken individually or together, these technologies do not provide graphical methods for designating desired content that has to be assembled, extracted and/or organized from a variety of sources. Whether taken individually or together, these technologies do not provide efficient, effective and easy-to-use facilities for mediating between intuitive human perspectives on content and details of representations of content in markup languages.